Online advertising may be an important source of revenue for enterprises engaged in electronic commerce. A number of different kinds of page-based online advertisements are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a page to be configured to contain a location for inclusion of an advertisement. An advertisement can be selected for display each time the page is requested, for example, by a browser or server application.
One common variety of online advertisement is the display of advertisements based on a user's query term and/or query location. For example, a user may conduct an on-line search for a coffee shop in San Francisco. In this way, ads may be displayed for advertisers having relevant businesses located near the user's query location. Often the advertisement space for displaying the ads of the local businesses is limited in space. Only a certain number of relevant business advertisements may be displayed. A problem may occur in that there may be more businesses near the query location than can be displayed in the ad space shown to the user. A problem may arise in determining which business ads to display.